As critics have noted, the whole sentimental movement in English drama is opposed in tone to the cynical ethos of aristocratic privilege; but Dodsley explicitly advocates a democratic sensibility that estimates individual worth independent of the accident of birth. The "bourgeois sententiae" of The King and the Miller of Mansfield are certainly as ideologically explicit as the arguments for the value of the mercantile middle class in Lillo's The London Merchant (1731).[9] Dodsley did, after all, have working-class credentials; his years in "service" furnished the materials for Servitude: A Poem (1729) and A Muse in Livery (1732). The allegorical frontispiece to A Muse in Livery shows a young man aspiring to knowledge, virtue, and happiness but manacled by poverty to misery, folly, and ignorance, his foot chained to a giant stone inscribed "Despair."
Despite the play's clear egalitarian sympathies, it seems excessive to characterize Dodsley's work as "revolutionary" and to be reminded too forcibly of the coming events in France. And yet, as has also been suggested, things might now look different had there been a revolution in England. Plays like Dodsley's discomforted the government. As Fielding notes in the dedication of The Historical Register, For the Year 1736, the Gazetteer of 7 May 1737 had accused his play and Dodsley's The King and the Miller of Mansfield of aiming at the overthrow of Walpole's ministry. "Bob Booty" reacted to this threat from the stage by enacting legislation in June requiring that all new plays and all alterations of old plays be approved by the Lord Chamberlain; in contrast, the reaction of the monarchy to Dodsley's work was much more ingenious. The third performance of The King and the Miller of Mansfield, that from which the author was to receive the proceeds, was held "By Command of their Royal Highness the Prince and Princess of Wales." Both royal personages were present to honor the apprentice from Mansfield. "The Boxes not being equal to the Demand for Places, for the better Accommodation of the Ladies, Side Boxes [were] made on the Stage."[10] Although the production of Dodsley's best play, Cleone (1758), was still twenty years in the future, it seems safe to regard this night as the height of Dodsley's dramatic career.
Auburn University
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. Leo Hughes, A Century of English Farce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 126.
2. The London Stage 1660-1800: Part 3: 1729-1747, ed. Arthur H. Scouten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), 457.
3. Ibid., 458.
4. Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher and Playwright (London: John Lane, 1910), 35.
5. Jean B. Kern, Dramatic Satire in the Age of Walpole, 1720-1750 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1976), 149.
6. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955-60), 2:204.